as depicted, you’ll see that the home team lost the game. Animals and cars also often find their way into Pierpoint’s work. “I’m a sucker for dogs, and a lot of the animals I’ve painted are ones that good friends or family have lost,” he says. “I grew up working on a truck with my dad, and so I’ve always had a love for automobiles—I’m kind of a classic car dork.” As you might expect of a graphic designer, Pierpoint has a passion for typography—the art and technique of creating and arranging type. The choice of fonts, and how it works with layout and color scheme, are all part of the finished design. It’s the same idea when Pierpoint brings typography into one of his paintings. “If I’m doing a painting of something like a vintage Harley-Davidson, I might look up the blueprints for the bike, draw over them, and integrate them into the composition,” he says. “I spend a lot of time coming up with the composition of a piece, and once I get to the paint side of it, that’s when I bend the rules to mix things up.” There was a time before computers when art was tangible. Instead of being rendered using a mouse click and printed out in a matter of seconds, artwork was done with a brush, a palette of paint and a piece of canvas. In Pierpoint’s world, it has always been one method melding with the other. “It could be creating something from which you get a texture, or drawing something by hand and bringing that onto a logo, a package or a website rather than using just any font that anybody could simply Google and grab,” Pierpoint says. “When you mix the two together, you get a more organic, authentic result.” Find more of Jesse Pierpoint’s work at jessepierpoint.com.
APRIL 2017 / spokanecda.com
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